Page 158 of Keldori By Daybreak

Linsey’s ear-splitting wail turned my insides cold, and then it cut in a strangled cry.

I knew what was hanging above me before I looked, but I forced my eyes upwards anyways.

The limp figure of a human swaying from the branches stole my breath away.

“It’s not real,” I repeated under my breath, but my palms turned sweaty and my knees went weak. “None of this is real.”

It hadn’t been real the first time, either, when Linsey had strung up a mannequin in a tree as revenge for her college expulsion.

The horror of it had been real enough, of course. There had been a moment when the shape in the tree had been my friend, and she was there because of what I’d done.

Her limp body twisted on its rope to face me. Linsey, blank faced and unblinking, stared into the trees with her head at an impossible angle. The joints in her neck cracked as her head straightened. Her unseeing eyes fluttered closed, then reopened to reveal pinpricks of light in deepset sockets.

Linsey’s jaw unhinged, and she screamed the horrible wail of a rotsbane, high-pitched and ear-splitting.

Bones splintered, and the branch she hung from snapped. The transformation into a four-armed mass of shadow and claws was complete by the time she hit the forest floor. Linsey was gone, replaced by a monstrous rotsbane with pinprick eyes that glowed the same blue as my magick.

She lunged, and her four claws reached out for me, but my legs felt like awkward stilts as I fumbled away.

She would’ve torn me to shreds had the noose around her neck not tightened at the last moment, jerking her backwards. She whimpered at the figure that stepped out from behind her, holding the end of the noose like a leash.

Wild blue hair fell in thick tresses, and blue irises glowed against dark sclera. I had never gotten a good look at my own Nightmare before, and I wondered if there was any way I looked even half as beautiful as the version standing before me now.

“It’s always a Magician who thinks they will be the one who finally survives Ergoth’s strath.” Despite having stolen my face, her voice was ethereal and oily. Something about it made the shaved hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “But none of them ever survive. None of them ever will.”

“Who is Ergoth?” I demanded. She couldn’t be me, despite the fact she wore my face.

She held out a hand to catch a bright spore on her fingertip and blinked her luminescent eyes at it.

“We are Ergoth.” She gestured at the trees. Bark and leaves rippled, revealing towering stalks of fungus again. I hadn’t made it out of the strath at all. The spores had only made me believe I had. “Ergoth lives in the strath, and Ergoth is the strath. We sense you are a powerful Magician, so by the end of tonight, you will be Ergoth too.”

“Over my dead body.” Magick buzzed in my hands as a flail took shape.

“That is the idea, yes. Ergoth makes the spores. You breathe them in. You create wonderful nightmares for Ergoth to inhabit.” She held her hands out as if to show herself off. “And then, Ergoth can hunt.”

Ciarán had been correct. Hallucinogenic spores laden with Skal so that anything our brains dreamed up was made real, which the forest then adopted into its hive mind, probably through those same damn spores. But if the hive mind, Ergoth, had a consciousness, maybe they could be reasoned with.

“But why?” I demanded. “We’re trying to save Skalterra. Let us pass through—”

“Magician politics do not concern us,” Ergoth replied. “We only want to feed. We like dead things. You will stay in our strath until you are also a dead thing, and we will feed on you.”

“I’m just one dead thing.” I stuck my arms out, the same way she had, showing off the meager amount of potential dead thing my body offered. “I can’t feed a strath.”

“No, but this will be a dead thing soon.” She put a hand on her chest, and then on the rotsbane’s back. “And this. And the other constructs you create. And the more you breathe our spores, the more constructs there will be. The longer you survive, the more we get to eat. The more powerful you are, the longer you survive. But you will die. You are curious. I can feel it. Would you like to know how?”

“You’d really tell me how you plan to kill me?” I scoffed.

“Strong Magicians are strong because they are stubborn. Stubborn Magicians stay alive longer out of spite. But they always end up rotting.” Ergoth’s stolen face split into a too-wide grin. “The rotting tastes the best.”

“I’m not about to be killed by a talking mushroom.” My flail crackled as I wielded it ahead of me. “Neither is my friend. Let us through, or—”

“Your friend? He…” Ergoth paused, and her eyes grew wide over her smile, “…feeds us. He was powerful. The powerful Magicians never fight long.”

“You’re lying.” I tightened my grip on my flail. “I still feel him. He’s alive.”

But I didn’t like how distant his mind felt from mine, like I was reaching for him through a fog.

“Do not worry. He assimilates with Ergoth,” Ergoth crooned. “Ergoth will keep him alive for many years, so we may feed on his nightmares. And then he will die and feed us one last time. As will you.”